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Cheetahs Heading Towards Extinction as Population Crashes (bbc.com)
The sleek, speedy cheetah is rapidly heading towards extinction according to a new study into declining numbers. From a report on BBC: The report estimates that there are just 7,100 of the world's fastest mammals now left in the wild. Cheetahs are in trouble because they range far beyond protected areas and are coming increasingly into conflict with humans. The authors are calling for an urgent re-categorisation of the species from vulnerable to endangered. Cheetahs in Asia have been essentially wiped out. A group estimated to number fewer than 50 individuals clings on in Iran. [...] In Zimbabwe, the cheetah population has fallen from around 1,200 to just 170 animals in 16 years, with the main cause being major changes in land tenure.
The main reason animals get extinct is human presence. We are a bigger threat to wildlife than even nuclear fallout.
The word you're looking for is "bred". They're being bred in zoos everywhere.
They may be being bred in zoos, but that's not a healthy situation for the species.
I recently reread Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" (I liked it as a teenager, but thought it was pretty crappy all these years later.) But I digress.
One notable thing though in the story is the idea of capping human population to one billion. I don't know if one billion is the right number, but it does make me wonder if there isn't some merit to the idea.
How do you cap the human population?
Soylent Green, obviously.
When the article says changes in land tenure in Zimbabwe, that means the racist thug Mugabe seizing lands from whites, and passing it out to his political cronies, who apparently, in addition to being shitty farmers are also bad at wild life management.
One notable thing though in the story is the idea of capping human population to one billion.
It's bad enough with things like China's child policy. My question is, are you volunteering to be one of the humans culled to get down to one billion?
Forced birth control.
As humanity continues its relentless reproduction, it will continue to strain the world's resources. Add in climate change, and humanity will pay the price and there's no technological miracle that will save it.
And if the predictions prove true that the World's population peaks at 10 billion or so, it will be a hellish overcrowded world indeed. And judging by the current economic path we're on, it's going to be a world of billions of people in poverty and a small minority of fabulously wealthy people. Basically, the whole world is going to be like that shithole India.
The world population is leveling off but not before adding 4 billion more people in the next 50 years .... Mostly in Africa. There is not much to be done about it, the increase is mostly "population fill in" you need to watch this Hans Rosling video if you're unfamiliar with that term, too hard to explain https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
What entity is going to force birth control on the human population?
It is sad that it is apparently difficult to breed cheetahs in captivity - they need large open spaces to run and do their courtship rituals. Which is particularity bad, because they actually are one of the easier wild animals to tame, and would be fairly easy to turn into pets (and thus in no danger of extinction) if that breeding issue where solved. I know I would love a pet cheetah.
http://cheetah.org/about-the-c...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
You don't have to cull anyone. Just encourage people to have less kids.
And STOP SOCIALLY OSTRACIZING PEOPLE WHO DECIDE NOT TO HAVE KIDS. Especially women. They're doing the world a favor and you have people calling them "selfish" or treating them as second class citizens for not joining the parental cult.
My girlfriend and are voluntarily childfree and get bullshit like this from time to time.
And no offense to parents who don't behave this way. Ya'll are awesome. There's just way too many who do.
We should cull everyone who asks if someone is volunteering. They're clearly too clueless to be allowed to live.
Thanks for playing.
What entity is going to force birth control on the human population?
Nature?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Also scientists also confirmed the sky is blue and water is wet.
Stay tuned and we'll bring you more breaking stories at the top of the hour.
In this country, i.e. the USA, we could stop giving tax exemptions for more than two children. I don't know how other countries structure their taxes.
If you want to have a large family, fine, but you don't get a tax advantage for doing it.
Between Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Communists.
You might have to start by burning a few religious monuments down in an opposing religion's name, but after it is all done, the population will be dramatically reduced.
they are all as unique as Chinese people after Reagon reported Xerox to China.
First the healthnuts came for the potato chips, and I sighed. Then the healthnuts came for the mohicans and I was like ahhhh. Then the healthnuts came for cheetos and Ive been a raging furry mad for lesbians!
I don't think there is a natural mechanism to force birth control on humans. I am under the impression that these people want some other entity culling billions of people somehow. Perhaps a world government or something?
If it's brown people abroad, the USA, if it's brown domestic people the Republicans cutting down social security and ensuring gangs have all the guns they need and for the rest, daytime TV should do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We should cull those who demand a culling.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh yeah the looks they give you. ;-)
I suppose deep inside they feel like it devalues their life choices. Some can barely fathom it. "But WHY??" Yes why give up the most meaningful thing in YOUR life? Because it's mine, and I find meaning elsewhere.
(And I don't think a kid will save my marriage
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Does that bullshit force you to not pull out sometimes? I find it hard to believe you get more than a good natured "when you two going to have kids" from anyone other than one of your parents. And at that point it's your parents not society.
What do you think a condom is?
http://assets.nydailynews.com/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
A condom is just a mechanism of birth control. You aren't going to "cap" the population unless you persuade (precise meaning varies) the whole world to start using them.
Yeah, humans destroying every natural thing on the planet is not stuff that matters.
For all these years I thought this was just an expression.
Nature has been subverted by technology. Damn scientists
People who want to keep wild animals as pets are awful people. You are an awful person.
A cheetah is genetically more than 99% identical to other cheetahs because they suffered not one, but TWO population bottlenecks where the population was wiped out but for a small number of breeding pairs - the first about 100k years ago, the second about 10k years ago. This leaves them all basically as related as identical twins.
Their doom isn't necessarily humans (at least, not any more than any other large predator) it's their lack of genetic diversity that means a local population can be devastated by a single nasty disease.
They may NOT be saveable, and it's only peripherally due to humans.
-Styopa
Trees are not better than humans either, but without trees, there are no humans.
If the goal is to discourage population growth, why would you subsidize reproduction at all?
Why? The USA is already having children at a rate below replacement levels. The only reason its population hasn't been SHRINKING the last couple of decades is immigration.
If you're one of the people who thinks population growth is a problem, the USA is not the place to try to attack the problem. Its a model to be emulated.
Just encourage people to have less kids.
On the contrary, large families are a more efficient way to raise humans than small families. Large families reuse clothes, carpool, waste less food, and often produce people who are skilled at doing the same, even when they themselves don't choose to have large families.
And that's just the families angle. There's also the problem of different reproductive rates of different countries. How does it affect the cheetah population if a couple in Finland or in Costa Rica decides to have five kids instead of none or two?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Of course you're serious, because your a malignant 4chan sociopath whose got bored of that big ol' psychopath and goes out on the Intertubes looking to shock people. Basically, you're incurable scum.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm all for conservation of species, but it seems to me this is just the symptom. Save the cheetah, then what next? Many species are being driven to extinction as well. You can artificially inflate the numbers by pouring lots of money into breeding programs like the Chinese have done with pandas, but that does nothing for the underlying causes.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
And the rest of us thank you for removing your genes from the genepool.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Sadly, the females I know that have opted not to have kids happen to be the type of genetic stock we want to encourage. Smart, resourceful, able to look ahead and see this is not going to be a good place soon...
I find it odd that we require training and a license to operate a motor vehicle but anyone can raise a Jeffrey Dahmer as long as they avoid minor troubles that would cause a social worker to become involved. And if you want to teach your kid to hate a given group or type of people, well that is your right as long as it does not lead to violence from the child... once he's a adult all bets are off.
One last issue is doing some genetic testing to check for bad recessive gene matches and other not so obvious problems that could warn a couple in advance of major issues and lifelong disabilities in future children... we could have that now if it weren't un-PC to tell someone they can't have a kid because it will be damaged and have a crappy life.
But we can't take away peoples "freedom" to populate us into extinction, can we?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
And in the USA, 1 in 8 individuals don't get enough food; there are millions more, many of them skilled in modern technologies and tasks, who cannot find employment. Seems to me that's a pretty damned good candidate for circumstances people might sanely decide they don't want to bring offspring into.
Well, insofar as maintaining our already too-large population might be construed as a "good thing", so what if they're immigrants? What does it matter what line they were born on which side of?
What matters (outside of the bounds of xenophobic and jingoistic neurosis, of course) is what good they can do for our society, and what good they can do for themselves. Personally, I don't care what color you are or what language you speak or where you were born. If you are a positive force overall, I'm a fan. If not, and you are trying to be, I'm still a fan. If you are not, and you are not trying to be, now we're talking about someone I'd just as soon see go away.
Those idiots who foam at the mouth about "those damned immigrants" will be the first ones to complain when the cost and availability of fruits and vegetables go in inconvenient directions; when the taco truck disappears from the corner; when clothing becomes (much) more expensive, when getting the lawn mowed, the kids nannied, the ditches dug -- and many more things -- all become far more troublesome.
--fyngyrz
anon due to mod points
As the article hints, the issue here isn't really raw population, its land.
Mating for Cheetahs involves miles and miles of chasing. If they don't have that kind of grassland space available to them, there will be no more cheetahs.
This is also why they could not be domesticated (even though they are quite tamable), and cannot be bred in captivity. Zoos cannot save them. If they go in the wild, they are gone.
Bullshit. Let's not forget bullshit. We wouldn't be here without bullshit.
What the fuck happened to this site?
Uneducated idiots like you are allowed to breed.
That's what happened.
Your English sucks, you uneducated dipshit. Leave the internet and
go get a basic education before you come back.
Because hopefully one of the kids will grow up to know what the excluded middle fallacy is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Oh look! An idiot on the internet!
People that have kids have no problems with people who don't have kids. We realize that not everyone wants or needs to choose that path.
The people we do have a problem with are those people with no kids that (a) tell us how we should raise our kids or (b) get irritated with something they perceive as annoying behavior from our kids. Our collective response to that is, "Shut up, you have no idea what it actually takes to raise a kid, no matter how many books you've read on the subject. Why? Raising a kid is a *fundamentally different experience* from anything you might have read or imagined; thus, you have no frame of reference to judge any parent by."
This is obviously caused by global warming.
Actually if we ate cheetahs there would be more of them. There are 1.5 billion cows on earth.
I've gotten that crap from a ton of people, not just parents. Lots of family, friends, and even a few coworkers. Luckily in our case my GF has a medical condition that makes pregnancy a very bad idea, so most people only ask once. Then they feel guilty like they reminded us of a deep sorrow in our life, when in reality we wouldn't want kids anyway
People that have kids have no problems with people who don't have kids. We realize that not everyone wants or needs to choose that path.
Tell that to the people who have a problem with me choosing not to have kids
You don't have to persuade anybody- all you have to do is raise their standard of living. To a paltry $4k-$10k/household annually. Do that and suddenly the entire world is a replacement rates of fertility.
Reproduction and intelligence are inversely related. This is not good for us.
You were born, and you're stupid.
Can't really draw much from a sample of one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I counted it up once, and even with adoption, it's below replacement rate. Or maybe it's me who is special and it is you who is a loser.
I showed Rosling's video to a anti-kid friend and she told me that none if it was true and that he's "pushing an agenda" (cut and paste from email).
You have an economic system that requires a constant increase in population - countries all over the place start panicking when fertility-rates start to approach the minimum required for sustaining the population (replacement birth rate), which is 2.1 in Western countries, 2.33 globally.
Yes, several are below that rate, and many specifically take steps to try and increase it, though some manage to offset the difference via immigration.
They're doing the world a favor and you have people calling them "selfish" or treating them as second class citizens for not joining the parental cult.
Thank you Mr. Malthus for your opinion.
The people we do have a problem with are those people with no kids that (a) tell us how we should raise our kids or (b) get irritated with something they perceive as annoying behavior from our kids.
It's a rare form of human that enjoys when someone calls them out for being a dimwitted fuckbag.
That's just because I apparently provide major cash incentives through my taxes to ranchers in the midwest not to do absolutely nothing with that shit ton of land they inherited from their grandpappy.
What entity is going to force birth control on the human population?
Oh, the perfect, uncorrupt, wonderful government that knows best.
From the "progressive" dreamland.
Hey, it beats the (un)"Free Market."
Aren't you special? I've never been asked if I'm going to have kids - from anyone.
Maybe everyone who knows you just shudders in horror at the thought of you having kids and decides it's not a good topic to bring up?
Reproduction and intelligence are inversely related. This is not good for us.
Not really, Idiocracy was a funny movie and all, but doesn't in any way match reality.
Pretty sure he's talking about domesticating the cheetah, not just grabbing a wild cheetah and keeping it on a leash.
But cheetahs need to run, not much room in the city for them.
The people we do have a problem with are those people with no kids that (a) tell us how we should raise our kids or (b) get irritated with something they perceive as annoying behavior from our kids.
If your kids are annoying others, you are failing at raising them into humans. Teach them better behavior.
This is an unfortunate catch-22. Tax exemptions are given to parents for the sake of their children, not as an encouragement or congratulatory gesture for the parents (at least not in this country). Helping to keep the family out of poverty through favorable tax treatment is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to help the children grow to be productive members of society.
At the same time, even if it might not be the intention of the program: giving money to people whenever they have children does tend to function as encouragement for having more children. I don't believe that there's any evidence that it's sufficient encouragement in most cases, but it did happen once - Linda Taylor, the welfare queen - and that one case was heavily publicized in order to demonize welfare programs in general.
You can imagine some kind of system where parents who irresponsibly have too many children are not only penalized but their children are also taken away to ensure that the children don't feel the negative impact of whatever that penalty is. This would avoid the problem of perverse incentives, but the children would have to be cared for somehow and this would probably be very expensive. It's also questionable whether it would be possible to provide sufficient care for all of those children to develop in a healthy way.
It's not easy being cheesy.
In the US, I don't think the reproduction rate is up to replacement level, but this is masked by immigration. If we want to hit replacement level, we have to make parenthood more attractive, not less.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What entity is going to force birth control on the human population?
depends on if you are talking about the human population or just segments of it. There certainly are a great number of individuals that would love to do it to browner segments of the population.
I don't think there is a natural mechanism to force birth control on humans. I am under the impression that these people want some other entity culling billions of people somehow. Perhaps a world government or something?
No, I think s/he meant that we can limit population ourselves or have a crash forced on us. There doesn't seem to be any plausible way that humans will take on limiting population themselves. Ergo, etc. Presumably, you reject the premise. So, population keeps growing until ...?
Xtinguish Excrement and Diarrhea Colored Anthropoid. That easy. Sterilize the females, do not let it sexually assault Human females, criterion is relatively easy to assess, in one generation it is over and the worst source of conflict on Earth gone. That leaves us only Orientals as a problem. That is not easy, but with genetic engineering, if we achieve NON cross breeding with Humans, and cap the lifespan of males at just about after puberty, enough to keep their species going on, we can stabilize the Human population at any level desired by having both species cross copulate at will and, simultaneously, breeding children in an orderly manner each in its own species. This works for both species very well. You can do your mental experiments to see how it works, then your figures. Surprise! Whenever I expose the scheme, they agree it is OK! In fact: the formula given to me by an African female to achieve this is to DO NOT LET THE GIRL HAVE A GIRL. Or cap your girl! As for Orientals when I tell them about this, they not only agree, they want to come with me and shut up the male. We are in time and we have the technology. But we HAVE to ensure to map the cheetah DNA before letting it go extinct... - Danilo J Bonsignore
Cap THE, Girl, is the formula. Girl does not have the same meaning among Excrement Colored Anthropoids than with Humans. Oh, and we have to do it BEFORE both imitative species do it on US! We are providing the technologies and they already got the idea from me. Which is one reason Governments have done an effort to teach quality and egalitarianism and non **racism**, that if you say what we truly _have_ to do with them... in the meantime we organize, THEY SIMPLY DO IT ON US, because it is the only content in their communal minds. It is mind boggling indeed, but it is how things have been working, whether you like it or not.
Silly idiotic, AC. Why dont you reduce to I agree, I disagree? Common places can go anywhere, not in a discussion forum.